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Invention: Phone-bomb hijacking

For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled the world’s weird and wonderful patent applications each week, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is now available exclusively online. Please send us your feedback.

Phone-bomb hijack

Cellphones provide a simple yet effective way for terrorists to trigger a bomb remotely. But now a portable device devised by US defence contractor Raytheon could quickly identify and disable such weapons.

The device includes a transmitter that mimics a cellphone base station and a metal horn to concentrate the signal from a 10 milliwatt power source in a single direction. Scanning suspicious luggage with the tool tricks a concealed phone into thinking it is in range of a new network base station and blocks it from any genuine stations in the vicinity.

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The suspect phone will also respond with a “handshake signal” containing its phone number, allowing a network operator to temporarily disconnect it from the real network, and preventing it from receiving a detonation call.

If the suspect phone turns out to be innocent, the worst that happens is that the phone needs re-connection.

Voice over IP patching

Internet telephony, or Voice-over IP (VoIP), is exploding as a cheap alternative to the normal phone system. But, as anyone who has tried it will know, VoIP can sometimes sound like underwater gargles, as bits of conversation are lost as they travel across the internet. Thankfully, five Japanese inventors have come up with a way to conceal these annoying gaps.

When a chunk of speech goes missing, software analyses the pitch and volume of sound in the preceding packet as well as the one received after the gap. This information is then used to synthesise a sound to fill in the blank. For short gaps, the sound is almost normal and, even if a whole word goes missing, the effect should be a lot less annoying than silence.

The technique should be better than using a big memory buffer to re-assemble late packets, as this typically adds an awkward “latency” delay to the speech.

Chameleon hacker trap

Now IBM researchers in Austin, Texas, have developed a decoy that could catch even more hackers in the act, by repeatedly “morphing” to mimic new systems. The chameleon-like honeypot changes IP address, passwords, and security settings to confuse and confound an attacker.

And, as the hacker probes the decoy for confidential data such as bank details, it builds a database of all their tricks, some of which may be brand new. These are then used to tighten security on the network’s real systems which hold genuine data. The trick could prove especially effective on increasingly popular, but ill-configured, wireless networks, IBM suggests.